


play pretend

by strangetowns



Category: Lovely Little Losers, Nothing Much to Do
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 18:45:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4360211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangetowns/pseuds/strangetowns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Living in this moment means you don’t have to think about all the other ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	play pretend

**Author's Note:**

> alternatively: an attempt to rid myself of these lll feelings in the vaguest way possible. I have no doubt this whole fic will be disproved soon [in the next episode, even!] but let me have my fun while I can, okay.
> 
> Title is pulled from Tove Lo's “[Habits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh2LWWORoiM)”, but this is mostly inspired by ODESZA's “[Always This Late](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8-QPnnM7j8)”.

Mornings have a habit, nowadays, of feeling like hell.

At least this time you don’t have a hangover, you muse as you drag yourself, in all your heavy-limbed and crusty-eyed glory, to the kitchen. Though with the amount of sleep you got last night – or lack thereof – it probably wouldn’t make that much of a difference. Either way, you’re suffering.

Thankfully, the flat’s coffee supplies were recently replenished, and it doesn’t take you long to get a coffee pot going. In and out, just long enough to pour yourself a nice cup of coffee, that’s how it’s going to be this morning. You don’t have class for another few hours, which is another few hours you plan to spend avoiding all human contact in order to coax the life back into your thoughts.

A futile strategy, as it turns out, because as the coffee finishes, you hear the door squeaking open, and a voice that would make you tighten your grip around the coffee pot handle if you didn’t know any better.

“Hey, Peter, you planning on drinking all that coffee?”

You start pouring the coffee into your mug. “Yeah. Sorry. Honestly, I might need a second pot.”

“Rough night?” The sound of a cupboard opening behind you, the soft clattering of a bowl or a plate being removed from the shelf. You don’t have to turn around to know the smile that will be on his face – small, sympathetic perhaps, and certainly honest.

“You could say that.”

“Make sure you get something down with that coffee. You know, something food-wise? Running around with just coffee in your stomach is not fun.” Fingers fumbling at a cardboard box, cereal rushing into an empty bowl. You can see it so clearly without seeing it. It makes you want to punch yourself, sometimes, how well you can visualize his movements. You don’t have a right to know him that well anymore.

“Speaking from experience?”

“Maybe, maybe. I can pour you some cereal, if you want.”

“It’s fine, I’ll figure it out,” you say to the steam coming off the coffee.

“Oh. Okay.” Shuffling steps across the kitchen floor. “See you later, then. Have a good one.”

“Yeah, have a good one,” you say, turning around, even though you know he’s already gone. It’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?

You take a sip of your coffee. No, one pot won’t be enough to relieve the exhaustion in your bones. Twenty pots wouldn’t be enough, not for this kind of tired.

Sleep has not been kind to you.

-

“Hey, what was your name again?”

She’s pretty. You can barely hear her voice over the throbbing bass.

“Peter,” you say, flashing a smile. “Peter Donaldson.”

“Do you want to get out of here?”

You think about another night spent alone in your bed. You think about another night trying and failing to fall asleep. You think about the warmth of intimacy, and you think about what it’s like to spend a night wide, wide awake.

“Let’s head back to my place,” you say.

-

You’re scared of time.

You’re scared because sometimes you can feel the seconds brushing against your skin as they pass you by, an unmistakable grind that accumulates into the minutes, hours, days you’ve wasted. Time that marches on is more time that separates you from a past you don’t want to remember and a past that fills your every thought and dream, and it’s less time that separates you from a future you can’t know and don’t want to.

The present is safe, comforting. Living in this moment means you don’t have to think about all the other ones.

-

“Can I kiss you?”

You like the way the light glints off his teeth when he smiles, and you like that he wears glasses, and you like that he doesn’t remind you of another him at all.

“Okay,” you say.

It’s nice, you think, kissing someone you don’t have history with, someone with whom you don’t have to spend months trying to figure out what friendship and love and the line in between mean. It’s like a breath of fresh air.

-

When you walk into the living room, he’s sitting on the couch, watching television.

“Hey,” you say. “What’s happening here?”

“Well, I’ve got some downtime before I have to meet up with my project partner,” he answers, his eyes stuck on the screen. “I reckon Ben and Freddie are still in class. Which is fine, just means I’ve got full rights over the remote.”

“Oh. That’s cool.”

“Flight of the Conchords is about to be on.” He gestures at the television with the remote. “If you’ve got nothing else going on you should watch some with me.”

This semester, you’ve prided yourself on your ability to make choices with confidence, without second – or sometime even first – thoughts. Right now, though, you can feel hesitation pulling any definitive answer you might give back into your gut.

Watching television is a totally normal activity for two friends to engage in. And he’s right, you don’t have any assignments you’d rather be doing right now. Really, doing anything but homework is obviously the rational choice.

Even still, you stand there for a full ten seconds before you drop your bag and sit down on the couch next to him. There’s space enough for the both of you to sit on it without touching, but somehow you manage to bounce onto the thing in such a way that your hips brush against each other. He doesn’t move away, so you figure it would be weird for you to do so. Anyway, the moment has passed. You settle back and try to enjoy the show.

It’s hard to concentrate on it. Not when you can feel the warmth of his arm next to yours. Not when you haven’t spoken a single word to each other that’s not completely civil in weeks, and not when you can feel the silence so keenly now.

The commercial break starts, and you feel full to bursting with silence.

You turn to him. You don’t know what you want to say – ask him how his day’s been? Ask him how his classes are going? Ask him what he thinks of the show? – but you have to say it anyway. You can’t stand being in his presence and feeling too – scared? – too _something_ to talk to him.

You stop in your tracks at the look in his eyes.

You weren’t meant to catch this moment, probably, this moment when he’s staring at you with fondness and something wistful and other feelings you don’t recognize in his gaze. When you meet his stare, his eyes widen, and he doesn’t look away.

“Peter,” he says, like a revelation.

That’s what does it, you will think later looking back on this moment, the way he says your name on a breath caught in his throat; that’s what pushes all of the silence building and building in your lungs and turns it into an instinct that leans you forward and catches his mouth with yours.

You didn’t mean to. You didn’t mean to turn to this boy, this boy you see every day and still miss with a permanent ache under your ribcage, this boy you’ve technically spent more time being friends with than anything else and yet you still can’t remember what it’s really like to be “just friends”, and do _this_ , of all things. But even though you know that you should have done more to stop yourself, even though you know you should stop yourself now, you don’t _want_ to. If kissing a stranger is like a breath of fresh air, kissing him is like remembering what it’s like to inhale and exhale even though you didn’t know you’d forgotten. His hands come up to press against your chest, and you’re scared he’ll push you away, but all he does is press himself closer. Kissing him is absolutely the wrong thing to do, and you will regret it as soon as this ends, but right here, right now, it just feels like the way it was always meant to be.

You don’t know who pulls away first. It happens, easy as a tide.

“Peter,” he says again, softly, so softly you want to pull him against your body, to protect him from the world and from everyone and from yourself; you want to cradle his face in your hands and smooth the wrinkles from his voice with your thumbs. You just want to touch him, because it feels like it’s been so long but you still remember what it’s like, the memory of his skin under yours imprinted permanently on the walls of your heart, and your hands stay still by your sides.

“Balthazar.”

He clenches his fists tightly around the fabric of your shirt, where his hands still are, and he sighs a small, broken sigh, and his fingers relax and something inside you just cracks, a little.

“Don’t,” he says, and he pushes himself off the couch and you watch in silence as he leaves the room. A few seconds later, you can hear a door close gently.

It would hurt less, you think, if he’d slammed it.

-

He stands on top of a hill, facing the dying sun.

He’s turned away from you, but you can still see it, the set of his shoulders, his arms by his side. There’s something in the wind, how it gently threads itself in his hair, something it whispers to you, or else you just want to see what the orange light looks like when it touches his face. You don’t need to speak to him, you don’t need anything; you just need to look at him, because there’s some nameless thing inside you that swells up when you see his golden outline and makes you feel like maybe this will be your last chance.

You run.

It feels like it’s working, at first. The hill is getting closer, the distance between you and him growing smaller, but when you get to the bottom of it you look up and you realize it was never a hill; it was always a mountain. The tallest mountain you’ve ever had to climb. He stands at the top of the mountain, unmoving, but stillness isn’t forever, and he will disappear with the sun when it’s swallowed by the darkness. You know this like you know the beat of your own heart, or his.

You climb.

You climb because you’ve gotten this far and you can’t imagine turning back. You climb because you’re afraid to lose him, to the shadows and to eternity, if you don’t at least try. You climb, even if it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done, because what choice do you have?

You struggle to the top, and he stands there. You can’t see his face. You want to, more than anything.

You put your hand on his shoulder. The sun slips beneath the horizon.

He vanishes under your sweaty fingertips.

-

You wake to the darkness of the backs of your eyelids.

It takes you a while to get your bearings with your eyes still closed. There’s a notebook pressed against your face, you think. You’re sitting in a chair. Your arms are asleep, especially numb where your head was resting. That’s right. You were working on an assignment for English. It was three in the morning, and you weren’t halfway done yet, and you thought, if you just rested your eyes for a minute…

What a stupid mistake.

There’s a reason you’ve been trying to avoid sleep.

You don’t want to check the time, or see how far you actually got with the assignment, or figure out how impossible it will be to finish. You can still see the light that framed his body, the image seared into your thoughts, and you know if you open your eyes, he’ll vanish.

There’s a part of you, deep inside of you, that knows it won’t change a thing. But at least if you keep your eyes closed, you can fool yourself into thinking you don’t know any better.

Darkness has never been a comfort, but at least in the dark you can pretend it is.


End file.
